This Europe: Polish church at war with right-wing radio priest

A radical radio station has drawn the wrath of Poland's Catholic Church amid increasingly frantic efforts by Cardinal Jozef Glemp, the veteran Catholic Primate, to silence its broadcasts.

The station has two million listeners and is filling Poland's airwaves, not with subversive pop or provocative shock-jockery, but with talk radio espousing such right-wing and conservative Catholic views that even the Vatican cannot stand it.

In the countryside, the signs on the sides of roads or the edge of villages are hard to miss. Underneath a simple depiction of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus are the words: "Radio Maryja 104.7FM". In some places the signs are outside the parish church, alongside notices about pilgrimages and Mass times. The station gives its devoted listenerslive Masses, hymns and sermons denouncing abortion and other evils.

What is upsetting Cardinal Glemp, however, is the extreme nationalist and anti-European Union tone of the station, and its links to the political right in Poland. One Western diplomat who tuned in speaks of Radio Maryja as "a thoroughly nasty anti-Semitic piece of work".

A decree issued by Cardinal Glemp banning the station from operating in the parishes of Warsaw came into effect earlier this month. But he has to be careful not to alienate Poland's Catholics too much at a time when the Church's authority is in decline. In the dark days of Communist rule, the Church welcomed the power of radio to preach the gospel of freedom, but now Cardinal Glemp finds himself at war with a radio priest.

Father Tadeusz Rydzyk belongs to a fire-and-brimstone Catholic order called the Redemptorists.

He has repeatedly been warned to stop meddling in politics. To imagine he might obey was possibly a faint hope in a country where the Church claims a proud history of trying to influence the nation's political destiny.

Poland's bishops gathered in the city of Wroclaw last week for a crisis meeting on Fr Rydzyk.

But even as they talked – some attacking the cardinal for failing to act sooner – the station was defiant, its programmes blasting Brussels and all its works. Fr Rydzyk insists on wrongly telling listeners who call his phone-in show that the Pope is opposed to the EU.

With unemployment in some rural areas as high as 35 per cent, Poland's ruling left-wing coalition is already facing a slump in public support for Europe.

Many of Radio Maryja's listeners are dismayed at the uncertainties that post-Communist change has brought to their lives. To them, Fr Rydzyk sounds like a man with answers.

Now Radio Maryja has struck up a close friendship with the League of Polish Families, a party of the Catholic right with 36 seats in parliament.

Today the party launches its campaign for a "no" vote in Poland's referendum on EU membership, to be held in six months.

Its anti-EU message, combined with access to the nation courtesy of Radio Maryja, could be a potent force.